Elon Musk Forms xAI Company To 'Understand the Universe'

Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk has officially joined the global artificial intelligence race.

In a Tweet posted on Wednesday, Musk announced that he was creating xAI, a company that aims to “understand the true nature of the universe.”

Announcing formation of @xAI to understand reality

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 12, 2023

The public will be able to meet the xAI team and ask questions during a Twitter Spaces chat scheduled for Friday, according to the company’s website.

"… We have previously worked at DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto... We have worked on and led the development of some of the largest breakthroughs in the field including AlphaStar, AlphaCode, Inception, Minerva, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4,” the website noted.

With yesterday’s announcement, Musk began positioning xAI to compete with companies like ChatGPT developer OpenAI and Bard maker Google. His team was filled with former engineers from Big Tech like Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI.

It appears Musk wants to make his own generative AI with a potentially significant emphasis on safety, as the billionaire has repeatedly called for regulating the industry before developments get out of control and become a risk to humanity.

Addressing the World AI Conference (WAIC) event hosted by China last week, Musk warned that governments worldwide should be worried about the accelerating AI expansion.

Notably, xAI has included the director of the Center for AI Safety (CAIS), Dan Hendrycks, as its advisor. The CAIS is a San Francisco-based research and field-building nonprofit organization that works to ensure the safe development and deployment of AI.

“CAIS exists to equip policymakers, business leaders, and the broader world with the understanding and tools necessary to manage AI risk,” the CAIS’ about page says.

Commenting on possible collaboration with other companies owned by the world’s richest man, xAI confirmed it will be a separate company from Musk’s X Corp., but will work closely with them to fulfill its key mission – to “understand the universe.”

Musk’s plans to create xAI were first unveiled by the Financial Times in April, along with reports that Musk purchased thousands of graphics processing units (GPUs) from Nvidia to power a large language model (LLM).